Vlet’s go to Food for Profit by Giulia Innocenzi, you screened it. Success or flop?
Success. Food for profit it was sold out with people standing, we also had to put in extra chairs. We screened it at the Teatro Nuovo in Capodarco which, yes, has just over a thousand inhabitants, but as with many other films, people come from within, from various provinces, to see it because there we send films that few show. Initially Giulia Innocenzi wore Food for profit where they called it, then having filled the theaters, because it moved the public, its public, like the various environmental and animal rights associations, became successful and seeing that many wanted it, it entrusted itself to the distribution of Mescalito and the documentary began to go even in multiple cinemas. We screened it on March 8th in Capodarco and on April 15th in Cattolica. Even in Cattolica, out of the 150 places there were, more than 200 people came, picking up chairs here and there.
There has been a lot of talk about The Chimera by Alice Rohrwacher and the controversy over the lack of or incorrect distribution in theaters and then, fortunately, also its success. I saw it here in Fermo with you and there was an incredible queue to enter the room. How do you explain this phenomenon?
To me Alice Rohrwacher like it, I really appreciated his first film, it was groundbreaking, Celestial body. Happy Lazarus he reminded me Miracle Milan. This also, The chimera I liked it, it has nice colors and good actors. Just think that we had planned it for the exit, not many people came, then she made that famous appeal on social media, she was awake eh, and so I said to myself “let’s give him another chance”. Not all the members agreed but I insisted “let’s give it a day and see”. So, it was December 26th, I called the girl who was at the box office and asked her how the screenings were going. “Are there people to see The Chimera?”. And she sent me a photo of the map with all the green places. So I said “wait but is it full or empty?”. Well, it was all full, not only that, there was also a long queue outside the door and I know that there were also those who couldn’t find chairs to enter and stood up because they wanted to see it at all costs.
So it’s true that the appeal worked.
The appeal he made worked. Maybe when it came out the public didn’t follow it, they snubbed it, I can’t explain the “posthumous” success. Saverio Costanzo’s film went badly, but because it also developed poorly, he presented it in Venice then after two months he changed it, cut it. Well, if you cut something after two months it means it was already wrong before. The story was also beautiful about this diva, about a memory I think of the Tavianis, Goodmorning Babylon, nevertheless…
What are the films that have achieved the greatest success with audiences in 2023?
Well, Kidnapped by Marco Bellocchio, I captain by Matteo Garrone, with whom we also worked a lot with schools and The Sun of the Future. We had also invited Nanni Moretti to present it…
And then?
Then he didn’t come, we probably didn’t understand each other. Too bad, it would have been Moretti’s fiftieth anniversary since he came to present his short films in the city in 1973, Vito Lauri invited him, Moretti even went to sleep at his house, he was very young. He came because there was an exhibition Making cinema and so we told him to come back in 2023 with The sun of the futureif you want a final testament to his cinema, perhaps he will make others but this is one of those films in which all his precedents are present… I’m a Morettian, of course, in any case I think there was a misunderstanding , otherwise he would have come.
Changing the subject, it is said that in cinema directors over 50/60 always tell the same old nostalgic leftist story, do you agree?
Look, I’m on the left and I was also a member of the PCI. Always going back to the past bothered me a bit, it’s true, you can’t always go and see the past, you also have to move forward. This thing about left-wing directors, this moral about the past… Well, I understand that today the ideals no longer exist and that we go looking back where there were a minimum of ideas and values but the mistake was that of not having brought them with us along the way and not having brought some correct values (not all of them were) to the new generations, and made them become immutable, so we always go backwards. It’s our fault because we thought we were superior at times, I think. I think of Nanni Moretti’s joke that in Red Palombella he said, referring to the PCI, “we are the same as the others but we are different”, we were unable to give this to young people and we, for this reason, remained different, isolated and instead we had to be different, yes, but equal.
